Mexico National Institute of Migration

Mexico's National Institute of Migration modernizes administrative procedures with the Fujitsu ScanSnap™ scanner

Industries:

Government

Offering Groups:

Scanners

Solution Areas:

Imaging Solutions

Regions:

North America

Challenges:

Track, deliver and store thousands of documents/week

Time-sensitive processing

Sensitive documents create security issues

Benefits:

Massive improvements in quality and productivity

Approval of entry/exit papers within hours

Documents shared and accessed securely

The Republic of Mexico consists of 31 states and one federal district that occupy a land area about three times the size of Texas. Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INAMI) is responsible for tracking and documenting immigrant travel at border entrances of all cities in the country. Roughly 100 to 300 applications are tracked each day and INAMI is responsible for more than 54 tracking procedures such as foreigner travel, migration and relocation, and imprisonment. Each of the functions require that the institute process many official documents including meeting reports, birth certificates, passports, identification cards, permission forms, memos, and highly sensitive documents outlining communication between high-ranking Mexican officials.

As you can imagine, accountability for all of the individual documentation at any migration office is extremely high. Having to manually track, deliver and store the thousands of documents processed each week is not only a daunting task, but also time-intensive and extremely insecure.

Traditionally, INAMI workers had to manually enter immigration content and send documents via mail or messenger service to the affiliated departments in various cities in which approvals were necessary. Additionally, all official documents for any INAMI activity had to be manually filed in storage cabinets.

On top of the lengthy turn around time, tracking the documents manually was also a difficult task. Since several important immigration office decisions are dependant on documents located at the central office in Mexico City, not having instant access to this information caused time delays.

Considering that each department has to interact with multiple cities in Mexico and ultimately file the finalized documentation in Mexico City, implementing a digitized strategy to send and receive the information electronically was critical. The Mexican Federal Government decided to look for a scanning and content management solution to assist in transforming the INAMI’s manual filing and labor-intensive processes to a digitally streamlined workforce where immigration files could be processed and managed immediately regardless of time or location.

Innovative Content Management System Modernizes Administrative Procedures, Increases Productivity
Mexico has taken many steps to modernize its country and has seen significant growth in the economy due to these efforts. The first step INAMI took towards modernizing and digitizing its workforce came via a new content management system called the Integral System of Operation Migratory (SIOM). SIOM is a solid database available to permit the immediate registration of information referenced by the institute’s daily operation of immigration applications. SIOM allows the immediate process of evaluating an application at the document reception window. At that time the processed information related to the migratory application presented by the foreigners who wish to enter to the country, as well as those who already have residency in México, can be immediately reviewed from beginning to end.

Consultoría y Servicios de Alta Tecnología (CSAT), a distributor and solutions integrator in content management, imaging and paperless solutions, quickly engaged with INAMI to suggest and recommend a way to implement SIOM as well as the hardware needed to begin managing the paper processing procedures.

The CSAT consulting department’s main recommendation focused on direct response time with the suggestion that the scanning of all official papers be immediately sent to other departments to facilitate efficient paper handling internally, ultimately saving money and time. A further step would consist of the retrieval of all digitized documents into one central image database. This way, all departments can have access to any document at any time, and the documents can immediately be centrally stored in Mexico City.

INAMI started using SIOM in February 2004. SIOM provides INAMI with 11 modules to track people entering different areas of the country, follow the paper work cycle from point of entry to Mexico City for the entire approval/denial process, and match passports to the internal system record file. One reason why CSAT won the INAMI bid was its recommendation to use the cost effective, functional and high-quality Fujitsu ScanSnap™ scanning solution as the basis for the digitizing of all the institute’s incoming documents.

The agents in each city that are in charge of digitizing documents are not technicians by any means, so they needed a simple, efficient, and reliable scanning solution to meet their demands. The scanning solution not only needed to be compact, so as to not take up an entire work area, but also portable with easy connectivity as the scanners would be potentially transferred from workstation to workstation on a regular basis.

A New Vision
With the innovative installation of INAMI’s new system, the institute is realizing more benefits than it ever imagined. With all of the INAMI documents now being digitized with the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner, the quality and quantity of work has gone through the roof.

Immigration papers can now be digitized immediately and sent to Mexico City or any regional offices. A simple project such as the approval of entrance/exit papers that used to take a long time to complete can now be finalized in a matter of hours. Archiving sensitive documents now takes just a few minutes and those documents can be shared and accessed across the county. Physical storage space has been minimized and an official central database has been established where all documents are securely stored.

In just a few months of using ScanSnap the results have been tremendous. INAMI plans to add more scanners in other parts of the country and has already started to utilize ScanSnap scanners in other departments such as human resources and internal administration.

About INAMI
The National Institute of Migration (Instituto Nacional de Migración) is a technical organization under the assignment of the Government Secretary (Secretaría de Gobernación). Since October 1993, the Government Secretary supervises the planning, execution, control, and evaluation of the immigration services as well as the coordination of the different departments of the Mexican public federal administration. The Mexican public federal administration works hand in hand with INAMI and is responsible for several other different affairs related to immigration.

The INAMI MISSION is to preserve the national sovereignty at the immigration field through promotion and facilitation of the flow of people around the country for individuals who favor the economical, social and cultural opportunities, as well as the required control and verification for national security, according to the laws respecting the immigrant’s human rights.

The INAMI VISION is a National Institute of Migration capable to document the total number of persons who enter to the country through diverse areas, maritime and border points of internment under its supervision with the attitude to offer migratory services with efficacy, efficiency, quality and professionalism. Those immigrants could also potentially be considered and qualified by international standards. National Institute of Migration also wishes to extend services that offer the expertise to potentially permit the authorization of the applicant registration, bureaucracy control, migratory flow and the other critical operations.